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The Commonwealth of Australia, also called Australia,
is the smallest continent in the world but the
sixth-largest country. It is located between the Indian
Ocean and the South Pacific Ocean and has a size of
7,686,850 sq km. It has about 18,000,000 inhabitants who
are concentrated on the eastern and southeastern coasts.
In the early years Australia was only a collection of
British colonies. But in the 1890's the colonies came
together in so called conventions and agreed to form a
federal government. The new Constitution was accepted by
the people of the colonies and by the British Parliament.
On 1 January 1901 the Commonwealth of Australia came into existence.
The country's capital is Canberra and the country is lead
by the Prime Minister John Winston Howard, but he is only
the chief of Government, the chief on state is nowadays
Queen Elisabeth II of UK, who is represented by Governor
General Sir William Deane.
The first Prime Minister was Sir Edmond Barton form 1901
to 1903. The first aboriginal member of the parliament
was Neville Bonner, who served form 1971 to 1983. He
belonged to the Native Australians called Aborigines who
are less than 1% of the whole inhabitants.
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 Paul Collins was born in England in the
year 1954 and raised in New Zealand. In 1972 he moved to Australia. He published his first novel Hot Lead-Cold
Sweat in 1975. In the same year he launched Void magazine. Collins edited and published five issues of
Voide between August 1975 and March 1977. The magazine
encouraged a new generation of Australian science fiction
writers and lapsed writer Wynne Whiteford and Jack
Wodhams to take up writing again.
In 1978 Collins started to publish books which later were
science fiction and fantasy novels. In 1981 he was joined
by his partner Rowena Cory, the painter of most of the
covers for their books. Collins and Cory published
fourteen Australian science fiction and fantasy novels by
such authors as Wynne Whiteford, A. Bertram Chandler,
Jack Wodhams, Keith Taylor, Russell Blackford and David
Lake. Collins closed the business of book publishing
after the publication of Chandler's novel The Wild Ones.
He thought that publishing would interfere with his own writing. Collins did a lot for the Australian genre
writing. Many of the books and stories he published were
also available overseas.
By 1980 he had sold twelve stories to magazines and books
in Australia and overseas. Since then he has sold over
hundred of stories. He also worked together with other writes, among them them Leanne
Frahm, Trevor Donohue,
Rick Kennett, Sean McMullen and Jack Wodhams. The best of
his work has been collected in The Government in Exile,
which was published in 1994.
Collins returned to editing in 1994 to compile
Metaworlds, an anthology of Australia's best recent
science fiction, for Penguin Books. This was followed by
Strange Fruit, an anthology of dark fantasy tales with a
literary bent. About that time he changed to young adult literature. His stories were also added to the Bookshelf
list of the New South Wales Department of School
Education and extracts were published in School Magazines. Collins compiled the first Australian heroic
fantasy anthology, which sold a third of its print run
even before it was released. Collins also had used a
pseudonym. He wrote under the name Marilyn Fate and
together with Sean McMullen under the Name Roger Wilcox.
Collins recent output has been mostly for children.
Learn more about
Paul Collins: Plasticne |
